


slipped into my pocket with my car keys

by portions_forfox



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-20
Updated: 2012-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And as they let the laughter fade away Liam stares at his hands, folded in his lap, and thinks to himself how utterly shit he is at not blushing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	slipped into my pocket with my car keys

**Author's Note:**

> These are real people; this story, however, is not.

On a Sunday afternoon they’re stranded in the middle of another big city, locked up like five horny teenage Rapunzel-Rapunzels in a hotel far far away. The evil witch in this scenario, Niall decides, is either Paul (“Definitely Paul,” Liam nods—“He’d make an excellent evil witch, don’t you think?”), or the homicidal fans waiting outside to strangle them. (“Strangle or hug?” Louis laughs, and there’s definitely a grave glint in Niall’s eye as he answers, “Same thing, mate.”) It’s moments like these when Liam starts to think being a super-mega-whatever star isn’t actually as exciting as it’s cracked up to be, which in other words means there isn’t much on MTV except another three-hour ode to Michael Jackson (“He’s...” Harry begins, and then his sentence trails off for absolutely no discernible reason, finally comes back to earth with, “...absolutely brilliant.” Louis yanks his hair and Harry chuckles).

Liam’s resting his back on about seventeen pillows, Niall’s sprawled out across the foot of the bed and Louis and Harry combined are taking up about three quarters of the wide expanse of floor. Seeing as it’s still, you know, the _morning_ , Zayn’s nowhere to be seen.

Except, ah, here he comes wandering in some twenty minutes later. “Where’ve you been?” says Liam, but it doesn’t come out quite as casual as he meant it to, so yeah, okay, he probably deserves the smirk and the “Nowhere, Dad,” Zayn shoots back. The lads laugh.

Still, Liam thinks, _nowhere_ ’s not quite an accurate explanation, because it’s kind of obvious from Zayn’s red-rimmed eyes and lazy grin he hasn’t actually been _nowhere_ at all.

Liam’s debating how possibly to swallow the matronly instinct rising up inside of him when Louis shoots his head up from unraveling a thread off Harry’s shirt, declares,

“Why, Wayne Wazzik, you’re high as a kite!”

Zayn squints his eyes and giggles in response.

 

 

“So like—nah, I’m serious, man, nah like—think about it for real, lads...there are all these parallel universies where everything’s, like, jus’ a li’l bit different, yeah? Like Princess Di becomes Queen or your mum gets famous or somethin’...and like...in one of those universes—no, listen, seriously, I’m serious, _heh_ —in one of those universes... _we’re all girls_. Iss crazy, yeah?”

Liam laughs, stops abruptly, laughs again. It all sounds quite slower than usual to his ears, which is funny, isn’t it, so he laughs a little harder and then a little harder, settling back onto the pillow he’s leaned against the bedpost. “Tha’s not—pssh, no...”

“No, iss true, iss true!” Zayn insists, but it’s quite difficult to take him seriously when he can’t really keep his left eye open and is very much struggling with that affliction as he speaks.

“I believe it,” Louis announces gallantly, and he leans across the circle to slap his hand down hard on Zayn’s shoulder. “I believe you, Zayn. Zayyyyn- _uh_. Zena. Zena the warrior princess.”

“I actually think that’s spelled with a—” 

“I christen you—” Louis straightens up his posture, stretches out an unbent arm and taps Zayn on both shoulders ceremoniously “—Zena, the warrior princess.”

Harry bursts into a fit of coughing giggles at that, low and rasping and pleasant, and “Zena,” he mutters to himself, “the warrior princess.”

Louis turns abruptly to Harry. “And what about you, Harriet?” he wants to know, and he’s doing that thing again, that thing where he keeps a dead straight face on for like over half the joke. “D’you believe it?”

Harry shrugs, leans back on the palms of his hands. “Dunno,” he buzzes thoughtfully. He frowns in contemplation and looks off into the distance with an air of finesse. “Suppose so, yeah.” He breaks character and giggles, partly because he’s Harry and partly because Louis is looking at him while he continues to exist as Harry.

Zayn nods stoically. “ ‘S true,” he agrees, and grins at this grand contribution.

“What am I,” Niall jumps in excitedly, hiccuping just a bit. “Hey lads, what am I. What’s my girl name, lads.”

It’s no surprise they all look to Louis, who puts on his thinking face and scratches his chin with his index finger.

“Nell,” he finally decides. “Nellie. You’re a _feisty_ little broad, Nellie,” and Niall scrunches up his face in shaking, wheezing laughter. 

“I’m Leah then, I suppose,” Liam supplies, mostly because he’d like to avoid a more dire fate at the hands of Louis Tomlinson. (Lilianna? Lemona? Lima Bean?), and partly because now’s one of those (few, very few) times he doesn’t _think_ before he speaks out loud. These times typically don’t work out very well for him. Now’s no different.

“And what type of lass am I?” Liam laughs (against his better judgment. Then again, he’s not sure he really has _any_ judgment right about now).

Louis sobers up now. Leans onto his left palm and into Liam’s neck, breath warm and smoky and lips brushing the top of Liam’s ear.

“A virgin,” Louis hisses, and then Niall is slow-clapping and Harry’s started up his cough/laugh hybrid again and Zayn’s grinning dazedly and trying to open his left eye and laughing while trying to open his left eye. And of course, Liam is blushing.

“Leah’s a good girl,” Louis sighs matter-of-factly, returning to his original position on the carpet (which is known as: unnaturally close to Harry). “Yeah, Leah’s an Honors’ student, she’s got a nice boyfriend from a nice family and she’s a dream daughter and a lovely friend and all in all a boring little twat.”

Harry’s staring at Louis as he speaks, and Liam’s done this with him enough times to know that he’s drifting in and out of coherent thought but grinning all the same, and then he looks down at his lap and back up at Louis again like he’s—like he’s _bashful_ or something. Giggles, of course.

“But Zena,” Louis is saying, and he shoots a sly glance at Zayn. “Zena’s a naughty, naughty girl.” Niall chuckles. Hiccups. Looks from Zayn to Louis (and then darts a wary glance to Liam, but Liam’s choosing to ignore him). “Sometimes when Leah’s leaving school at the end of one of her numerous uni-preparatory extracurriculars, she sees her out behind the school, smoking with her bad, _bad_ friends...” This Louis says with faux contempt, eyes narrowing in disdain. He knows how to carry out a joke. He’s pretty much the only one among them. “But one day...” Harry tilts his head back and to one side, then up again. Stares at the corner of Louis’ lips. Smiles, kind of slow. “One day Leah’s late leaving gym class because she stayed to talk to the professor regarding extra credit, naturally, but to Leah’s utter surprise— _Zena_ ’s in the locker room as well, on account of she skipped class to smoke and _snog boys, gasp_!”

Niall audibly gasps to help along the story, then breaks into another fit of scrunched-nose giggles.

“...and Zena comes over to where Leah is and says...” Louis pauses dramatically, “‘ _Hey_.’” (He drops his voice to a low, gravelly octave, despite the fact that he’s meant to be imitating a girl. Unless maybe he was going for the smoker angle, in which case, yes, okay.) “‘Hey, you’re that girl, aren’t you?’ And Leah starts to say, ‘ _What girl_ ,’ but before she even has time to finish, Zena is _pressing her up against the lockers_ , _kissing_ her with that dirty, dirty, _bad_ -girl tongue, running her smooth pale hands over the round swells of Leah’s breasts—”

“All right, all right, Jesus, that’s enough,” Liam interjects, cutting short Louis’ passionate tale of forbidden love. (“Forbidden love, Liam. Romeo and Juliet, et cetera, et cetera. You’re heartless, you are.)

“Too bad,” Niall sighs. “It was just starting to get good.”

Niall’s still laughing his scrawny ass off and Harry is distracted by smartfunnybeautiful Louis once again and Liam stares at the carpet, picks at a piece that’s sticking up and scratching. Shoots a glance at Zayn, who’s trying not to smile.

 

 

The others are loud as they leave the hotel for lunch, bumping, yelling, whistling, calling, tangling themselves up in each other. Niall’s belting The Biebs again, _If I was your boyfriend, if I was your boyfriend_ (he doesn’t know the rest), only with him it’s more like, _If oi wuzz yeh boyehfran, oi’d nevah let yeh goo_.

Louis laughs, groans, “Ugh, Niall, if you don’t shut the fuck up right now we’re replacing you with Damian McGinty, right, Harry?” And he lets out a whoop, leaps onto Niall’s back as they bumble out the door.

“Right,” Harry grins, yanking Louis’ waistband so it slaps against his back and he yelps.

“Isn’t that the Irish bloke from Glee?” Niall implores as they turn the corner. “Tha’s funny, heh.” Then, “You wouldn’t really, right, lads?” Then, “Right, lads?” and Harry and Louis laugh. By now they’re halfway down the hallway and out of Liam’s eyesight but he can tell, he can just _tell_ they’re darting eyes at each other whenever Niall looks away.

Zayn’s already shuffled up, is sliding open the door to the balcony, but Liam turns around just in time. Calls out, “Nice try, mate, but you’re gonna have to work a bit harder than that, yeah?”

Zayn whirls back around with a sheepish smile. He shuts the door and as it clicks closed warm sun beams in through the open windows. Feels like summer all the time.

“Bit of a hypocritical thing to say, innit?” And Zayn quirks a grin.

“That’s different,” Liam retorts immediately, because it is, it just is. “Spliff’s just for a bit of fun. But smoking _these_...Zayn, that’s just—” He shakes his head, squints his eyes, puts a hand up to his temple. “It doesn’t even make you _feel_ good. It’s just a habit, just a gross habit.” And he smiles a bit to amend it all, because he knows the others have put them in a good mood, a light mood, knows he usually says it with more teasing obligation than actual concern, but there’s something about the way Zayn looks right now, black hair mussed and eyelashes tilting up from the side and glasses glinting in some sort of, God, some sort of fucking _halo_ that makes Liam want to say it for real. Say _please, Zayn, come on_ , and mean it.

Zayn collapses onto the bed in a sprawled-out mess of limbs, looks up at Liam when he realizes he’s not there yet. Raises both his eyebrows like _duh, you idiot_ , and pats the top of the mattress.

Liam sits down beside him, carefully resting his head against some pillows as he folds his arms over his stomach. His legs are out in front of him, crossed one over the other. Zayn looks him up and down, smirks just a bit, but lets it go.

“So what do you wanna do?” Zayn asks, flopping his head down to stare at the ceiling, and Liam mumbles, “I dunno,” and there’s a pause. “Just watch the telly, I guess. As long as it’s quiet, you know?”

Zayn’s eyes are closed now and he rests both his hands behind his head, one elbow jabbing roughly into Liam, who doesn’t move. Zayn smiles a bit, quite tiny. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, I know.”

They end up watching MTV again, some countdown like the hundred hotties singles of the nineties that despite their best efforts they’re still too young to care about.

Britney Spears comes on, and Zayn reaches for the remote to turn it up.

“‘Hit me baby one more time,’” he laughs, eyes crinkling at the sides. “Would you believe I caught Louis listening to this once before a show?”

Liam lets out a hard, short bark of laughter. “No way,” he says, but thinks about it for a moment and then decides, “Well, if it’s Louis—”

“Yeah,” and then their eyes meet and suddenly, suddenly they can’t stop laughing. It’s that kind of laughter, the kind that steals away all control until it’s hard to remember how to breathe, the very essence of humanness forgotten for sheer euphoria. It’s been a while, Liam thinks. For the two of them, at least.

“That kid,” Liam concludes. “Is just—he’s just _batshit_ ,” and staccato bursts of chuckles still wrench themselves from his gut every few seconds.

“Yeah,” says Zayn, “he’s got quite an imagination.” And as they let the laughter fade away Liam stares at his hands, folded in his lap, and thinks to himself how shit he is at not blushing.

He knows he’s fucking insane to do it, knows it’s fucking mental, but he glances over at Zayn anyway, who smiles really, really slow at him, like—like he’s waking up one morning to a different sun and realizing he likes it, a lot. Smiles that way at him, then at his hands, then turns away still smiling to notch up the volume on the telly.

 

 

Louis says, “You know how these things work, don’t you?”

Liam feels like now would be a really good time to roll his eyes, but he gets distracted by the fact that Louis’ licking frosting off his fingers and Harry keeps glancing over his shoulders to grin and watch. They’re walking down a public roadway, for Christ’s sake, and Liam wants to yell, like, _hey, it’d be really cool if you saved the weird repressed sexual tension for another time_ , but then he remembers this is _Harry and Louis_ he’s dealing with, so like, yeah, not really going to happen.

“How what things work,” Liam says instead, trying to direct Louis’ steady smirk away from the back of Harry’s head. “Hey,” he says, “how what things work,” and he waves a hand in front of Louis’ face.

“Hm?” Louis starts, then pulls the finger from his mouth rather un-sexily, slobber and all. “Oh. Yes. How these things work.”

They’ve fallen into an impromptu formation on their way back from the restaurant, Niall stumbling backwards in the lead (about to run into a streetlamp, the drunk fuck), Harry and Zayn following closely behind and giggling drunkenly at Niall’s drunkenness, and Louis and Liam sauntering up from the back being the slutty drunk and the non-drunk that they are, respectively. For a moment Liam is quiet, easily watching Zayn and Harry try to convince Niall to crawl backward like a crab, _come on mate, just try it! No seriously, just try it_ , and as they pass under the streetlamp this...this, like, light...kind of falls across Zayn’s face? And he steps out of the dark and the lamp is casting flickering shadows, as cliché as that may be, across the lines of his forehead and his cheekbones and his collar, and in the dark and the lazy beam of yellow light Zayn’s smile looks—

Well. It looks good.

Louis is staring at him, he can tell.

“What?” Liam grunts, then to disguise it (what-the-fuck-ever _it_ is): “How what things work?”

“Life,” Louis drawls, and he grins a little, nestles his chin into the crook of Liam’s neck for a moment before trotting up ahead to spank at Harry’s bum. “It imitates art.”

 _Your story wasn’t art, you prick_ , Liam starts to say, but then Zayn turns around and smiles at him and he gets a bit—distracted.

 

 

It’s funny how unsurprised Liam is when he finds out they’re shooting their next music video at a school, like a proper secondary school with hallways and classrooms and, and _locker rooms_ and the like. _Oh_ , he thinks. _Oh, right_. Because it makes sense, doesn’t it—in a weird sort of way. He feels like now would be a really good time to roll his eyes, either at the universe or at Louis Tomlinson or at both, because the two of them seem to be bizarrely in cahoots, like, most of the fucking time.

“Did you do this?” he asks Louis when they find out.

“Me?” Louis says, his face the picture of innocence. “Do what?”

 

 

It’s getting close to time to go; they’ve got like maybe forty-five minutes left before they head out, and they’re all just lounging about the side of the tour bus with the crew and the Kraft food services, fucking around as usual, when Liam wonders, “Hey, where’s Zayn?”

Harry stops trying to avoid getting a piece of cake shoved down the front of his shirt long enough to say, “Yeah, I think he said he left his jacket in the locker room.”

“When?”

“When’d he leave his jacket in the locker room? I don’t know, mate, I prefer to leave the being-Zayn’s-mum thing to you.”

“No, Christ, when’d he say—”

(Liam huffs a bit during the pause he’s forced to take to accommodate Harry’s revenge on Niall, who’s just shoved a donut down the back of his pants.)

Then,

“When’d he tell you he was going to go get his jacket which he left in the locker room?”

Harry thinks it over for a moment while simultaneously batting Louis’ cake-hand. “Mm, half an hour ago, maybe? I don’t know.”

“Half an hour, Harry?” Liam says. “Half an hour to go get his fucking jacket?” But Harry’s not listening, because Louis’ just settled for stuffing the cake right into his face, which requires immediate attention, obviously.

 

 

Liam’s grumbling all the way to the locker room, because he figures by now they’ve got about (who’s he kidding, _exactly_ ) thirty-two minutes left to go before the bus leaves, and if Zayn’s still missing by then he swears to God he’ll have him killed, and if Zayn’s off snogging one of the girls from the video he swears to God he’ll have him, like, double-killed. Worst part is he wouldn’t put it past him.

“Zayn?” he bellows into the open room, and his voice reverberates off the linoleum walls. “Zayn!” No response. “Zayn, if you’re in here alone, I’m gonna—I don’t know—call your mum or something, you hear me? I’m gonna—”

He stops.

“Zayn, you’re not seriously—” Stops again. Has to take a moment. To process. “You are not seriously _smoking in the locker room_ , tell me you’re not serious right now.”

Zayn grins at him. “ ‘M serious.”

“You have got to be fucking _kidding_ me, man, I mean—”

“Does it bother you,” says Zayn, and he says it kind of like it’s casual, slides off the bench he’s sitting on to take a drag and a step toward Liam, “...my smoking?” And as his dark eyes flick up to meet Liam’s and the cheap-as-fuck fluorescent lights flicker overhead Liam has this sort of epiphany, this epiphany like he suddenly knows what déjà vu is.

“Yeah,” he gulps, “it does.” Zayn’s stepping closer now, close enough that Liam has to lean back a bit, and. And. It’s funny how he’s falling for all the steps, all the tricks along the way. Every one. It’s kind of pathetic seeing as he knew they were coming to begin with.

Zayn pulls the fag from his mouth, breathes out a line of smoke really close to Liam’s face so he has to squint his eyes against the cloud. He can sort of see Zayn smirking through the haze.

“Fine then,” says Zayn, and he drops the ciggie to the ground, stamps it out with one foot.

“I don’t—” Liam starts to say, and it’s ridiculous how quick and how easy it is for Zayn to toss out a leather-clad arm, press a hand to Liam’s chest and shove him backward into the lockers. Liam isn’t expecting it, so he feels a bit like he’s been manhandled, which sort of...sucks, but...also, doesn’t.

“Hey,” Zayn says, and two arms come up on either side of Liam’s head to crowd him in, which feels sort of contrived, doesn’t it, but he gets the feeling that’s maybe possibly exactly what Zayn’s going for, because, “ _Hey_ ,” he says, and there’s an inkling of a smirk, a grin, tugging up the corners of his lips, “ _you’re that guy, aren’t you_ ,” and seriously, fuck him for leaning in just as Liam starts to say something and before he can take a breath, fuck him for being so utterly and tragically cliché, fuck him for giving Louis Tomlinson the satisfaction of their lips meeting with a clash.

Zayn slips his tongue into Liam’s mouth, lets out a deep breath through his nose and brings his hips up to slam Liam into the front of the lockers. It’s safe to say Liam’s really, really flustered, which, fuck-all if he isn’t an idiot, considering he literally had the script for this beforehand. But eventually he remembers how to breathe and snog at the same time, and carefully he brings one hand up to rest against the back of Zayn’s neck, presses his fingers deep into the skin there.

Zayn starts to laugh into Liam’s mouth as he shoves a hand up Liam’ shirt, is sending echoes down the back of Liam’s throat with his fucking giggle as he presses a palm to Liam’s heart, and “ ’s not funny,” Liam mutters into Zayn’s teeth.

“It sort of is though, innit,” Zayn says, wraps his arm around to the small of Liam’s back. Rests it there like a promise. “Louis is gonna piss his pants.”


End file.
